Two Weeks' Notice (14 page)

And then it was too late to try to think, or plan. She only had time to react.

A light blazed on right in Bryn’s face, halogen-bright, and she sensed the attacker lunging at her. Something sharp flashed in the light. Bryn didn’t stop to think, just moved forward, blocked what was coming down at them, then met the attacker’s rush with one of her own. The flashlight went flying in a spiraling arc that showed color, wood, a confusing whirl of shadows.…

She grabbed the intruder more by luck than skill, and held both his arms away from her body as she used her momentum to drive him backward into a waist-high heavy table. She expected it to be Fast Freddy Watson, her nightmare bogeyman, or, possibly worse, Jonathan Mercer.…

But it wasn’t a
him
at all. The cry was feminine, and in the moonlight Bryn saw a long, sharp kitchen knife fall to the carpet. There was bright blood staining the first inch. From down the hall she heard dogs sounding alarms, led by Mr. French’s deep, ferocious barks, and ten seconds later, as she fought to hold on, the door of the room banged back and the lights went on.

Bryn was grappling with her sister.

Annie struggled wildly, screaming now; her hair whipped around her distorted face as she tried to break Bryn’s grip. She didn’t look…sane.

No, no, no
…This was what they’d feared, what she’d dreaded, but Annie had seemed so much better. And she’d responded to the Protocol cancellations.…

“Out of the way!” shouted a voice from behind—Joe Fideli, still fully dressed, who instantly grabbed hold as Bryn let go and backed away. He easily held Annalie and forced her down on the floor, where he put a knee on her chest to pin her as he administered a shot. It took only a few seconds, and then she went out, still as…

Still as a corpse.

He’d killed her. Anesthesia for the Revived.

Joe didn’t look up. “Get dressed, Bryn.”

She realized, with a burst of shock, that she’d been fighting naked and hadn’t even realized it. She found her shirt and pants and dragged them on without bothering with underthings, and then, belatedly, realized that there was one participant absent from the drama going on in the room.

Patrick was still in bed. He was alive, and he was breathing, but he had his hand clamped tightly over his slashed arm.

The bedding was a mess of fresh blood.

“Pat!” Training kicked in, and Bryn forced herself to slow down, push feelings aside. “Did she get the artery?”

“Yes,” he said. “Look after her. I’m fine.”

Not with that much blood outside his body, he wasn’t. Bryn grabbed up her belt from where it lay by the door and wrapped it around his arm above the wound, then yanked it as tight as possible before twisting it even tighter. “We need an ambulance,” she told Joe, who nodded and rose to his feet to pull out his cell phone. “What the hell happened?”

“What Pat thought might happen,” Joe said. “Your sister’s under Protocol. Mercer didn’t lose her; he sent her like a guided missile to kill you, or Pat, or both. Until we detox her with Manny’s new formula, we can’t break her Protocol conditioning, so I have to keep her out for a while, but we needed to be sure.”

Bryn remembered what it felt like to have her will taken away; it was one of the hidden military applications of Returné. That
undocumented feature
—that was what it was called, in bureaucracy-speak—was one of the first things that McCallister had asked Manny to change in the formula he’d developed independently…and the most difficult.

It wasn’t that Annie felt right about trying to kill them.…She just had no choice. She was a passenger in her own head, with no will of her own, until they could break the Protocol.
Which I thought I’d done.
It had been stupid. She’d fallen into the trap of her own wishful thinking.

But she couldn’t worry about Annie just now, not with Pat’s skin fading to a pale, shocky color under the olive tone. He looked calm, but there were stress lines around his eyes and mouth.

“I’d love to put on some pants,” he said. “If you don’t mind. Joe—”

“I’ll do it,” Bryn interrupted. She helped him dress without another word, and Joe kept watching Annie’s limp body as if his life depended on it. He was keeping his observations strictly to himself, which was very un-Joe-like.

“Hey,” she said, and put a hand gently on Pat’s face as he lay very still on the bed. He had his eyes shut, but he opened them and focused on her. “Don’t think I missed the fact that she was going for me first, and you got in the way.”

“I’ve been thinking,” he said, as if the segue made sense, “that I don’t want to just be friends with benefits.” It was possible he’d lost enough blood that he’d forgotten Joe was standing in the room, unable to
not
hear this. Bryn tried not to glance in that direction, but her cheeks burned a little. “I hope that’s all right with you.”

“Yes,” she said, and swallowed hard. “I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

“Good,” he whispered, and closed his eyes again. “Very good.”

Joe cleared his throat as his cell phone dinged for attention. Text message. “Ambulance is on the way,” Joe said, and pocketed his cell phone. “Damn. It’s way too early for this kind of excitement.”

Bryn wasn’t sure which kind he meant, exactly, but it didn’t seem a prudent time to ask.

Chapter 7

P
atrick’s slice to the interior aspect of his forearm needed stitches to close the brachial artery, and then more to match up severed muscle and flesh. It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as Bryn had feared. It was, for one thing, his left side and not—as Joe had laconically remarked—his main trigger hand. “Can’t shoot for shit with his left anyway,” Joe had observed. “If a barn’s attacking us, he might get a solid hit.”

Bryn could tell by Pat’s eyes that he was still doped when they rolled him out in his official release wheelchair, but only mildly, and the first thing he said was to Joe, not to her. “Is she still out?” Meaning Annie. He’d given the ER doctors a bullshit story about a kitchen accident, which they’d probably not believed but had accepted nonetheless.

“Like a hammered ox,” Joe said, as Patrick got out of the wheelchair and walked toward the sedan parked in the covered area. Bryn tried not to hover. He’d had a unit of fresh blood, but even so, he still seemed pale to her. “I let her wake up and put her on a slow drip of the new formula, but it’s going to take time. The Pharmadene
standard is pretty strong stuff, and it’s not easy to erase a Protocol—you know that.”

“You left her with Liam?”

“He’s armed, warned, and she’s strapped down.” Joe paused in the act of opening the car door and said, “I’m sorry, man. I should have gotten Liam to spell me when I hit the toilet, but she’d been so quiet all night I didn’t think she’d move. I was gone maybe two minutes, tops. Don’t know how she beat the door. My fault.”

“Mine, not yours,” Pat said. “I expected her to go for Bryn first, and Bryn
always
locks her door from the inside. I thought we’d have time to intercept. And I needed to let her try to act, so we’d be able to verify what he’d done to her.” He sent her a half-apologetic glance. “I was hoping I was wrong, but I thought you’d need proof to convince you that I was right.”

“Well, I think you’ve got it,” she said. “And how do
you
know I always lock my door?” Bryn always did, even in the mansion—the habit of growing up in a large family, and living in an apartment complex where theft was a common occurrence.

He didn’t answer that, other than with a slight smile.

“Oh, and by the way, no worries about me busting in on you,” Joe said with an insane amount of cheer. “Didn’t see a thing.”

Pat sighed and put his head back against the seat, eyes closed. “You’re not going to forget it, are you, Joe?”

“Which part? The two of you naked in bed? Bryn going hand-to-hand naked? Because it’s fairly memorable, my friend.”

“Pervert,” Bryn said. “I’m going to tell your wife.”

“She’d be shocked if I
didn’t
remember. And then she’d check me into the hospital.”

Bryn smiled, but her mind wasn’t on the banter; it was on her sister. Annalie had been lost for months, and come back…
brainwashed
wasn’t
the correct word, but neither was
wrong
, because she’d simply lost control of her body to the program.
It can be fixed,
Bryn told herself.
It can all be okay.
But she didn’t know that for certain. She’d seen Annie when Mercer had first taken her, and even then, she’d looked…damaged. Desperate. Almost destroyed.

Six months later, how much of the original Annie was still there to be saved?
I’m so sorry. I never should have gotten you involved in this.
She’d regretted it every day, but regret wasn’t helpful.

Nothing was helpful right now. She just had to wait and see how Annie came out of it. And Pat was right—she’d have to keep her guard up, regardless. She couldn’t trust her own sister anymore. Protocol instructions were wicked difficult to countermand when raised to their highest levels like this.

It was now almost eight o’clock in the morning, and as Joe drove them back to the McCallister estate, she held Pat’s free hand without even considering that she was doing so until they were almost home. It felt…right. Comfortable. After last night, they couldn’t reset the clock, couldn’t take that giant step backward, even if she wanted to…which she didn’t.

Whatever was ahead, she’d keep moving. Maybe it would end badly, or just end, period, but one thing was certain: the ride was bound to be…extraordinary. And bumpy. It was insane that she’d finally reached that breathless, intense space with Patrick, and had the world crash down on them almost immediately, but she had the sense that any relationship with McCallister was going to be driven hard by adrenaline.

Maybe he might say the same about her.

Bryn checked her calendar on her phone and sighed. “I have the job for Pharmadene this morning,” she said. “Don’t give me that look, Patrick. It’s fact-finding. It’s
not dangerous; it’s just fact-finding. All the file asked me to do was go in, meet with the owner, and ask some questions about invoices. It’s nothing. It’s white-collar crime, at worst.”

“Sure,” he said. “That’s why they’re sending the woman who can come back from the dead. Because it’s not dangerous. You’re not going without backup, and I’m not in shape to help.”

Joe held up a hand. “Yeah, backup, that’d be me. No bullshit, Bryn. I’m not going in with you, but you’re going in wired for sound and vision, and I won’t be far.”

“Wait a minute. Aren’t I your
boss
?”

“Sure, in a certain time and place. This ain’t it. The good news is, probably no big deal for me to run a wire up your bra anymore, now that I’ve seen you naked.”

She glared at him, and he gave her a slow, delighted smile that she couldn’t ultimately help but return. Especially when he gave her that wink.

Liam wasn’t waiting by the door, as he usually was. Bryn walked up the stairs behind Patrick, mainly to be sure he didn’t collapse, as Joe passed them, taking three steps to their one. By the time they’d reached the second floor, he’d already checked with Liam and stepped out of Annie’s room to give a silent thumbs-up.

“I need to check her,” Bryn said. “I know she’s fine, but—I need to do that.”

Patrick nodded, as if he understood. He probably did. She squeezed his hand a little and stepped into her sister’s bedroom. Annie wasn’t on the bed, as she’d expected, or at least not on the big, king-sized Victorian four-poster; she was, instead, strapped to a hospital-style gurney with thick Velcro restraints at her ankles and wrists, plus longer straps over her chest, waist, and upper thighs.

She looked as calm and peaceful as her own memorial statue. “God,” she whispered. “Is she all right?”

Liam was sitting in an armchair a few feet away, with a handgun on the marble table beside him. From the looks of it, he had it cocked and ready. He put down his book and said, “She’s resting quietly. Don’t worry. She’s fine.”

“Is she—” Bryn bit her lip. “Is she breathing?” Because neither dead nor alive really applied in this particular case.

“Yes, very slowly. She’s in a medically induced coma while we administer the new doses.” Sure enough, there was an IV on the stand next to her, leading straight into her arm. “She’ll be all right, I think. But it may take some time—you should clearly understand that.”

Annalie had been through hell itself for six months.
All right
was a dream Bryn didn’t even try to imagine. She’d settle for
breathing
for now. She smoothed her sister’s hair and kissed her pale forehead gently, then bent to whisper in her ear. “It’s okay,” she said. “Annie, listen to me: it’s okay. I know you couldn’t help what you tried to do. I know Mercer did this to you, and I promise, you’re never going to be this helpless again. You’re going to wake up in control of yourself, and nobody will ever be able to make you do something like this again.” She felt a blinding impulse to cry and forced it back as she blinked back the tears. “I love you to bits, you know that? I hope you do.”

Bryn pressed another kiss to her cool cheek and took a deep breath as she straightened. Liam was watching and didn’t look away or pretend to misunderstand her distress. “It’s possible she can hear you,” he said. “I hope that’s so. She’s in need of all the comfort she can get, I think. I’ve been reading to her, just in case.”

“Watch her,” Bryn said. “And…watch over her, too. I’ll be back soon.”

He nodded. “No harm will come to her. Just be sure
none comes to you, either. She needs you, Bryn, probably now more than ever.”

“I’ll be watching her back,” Joe said from the door. He held up a tiny device. “If you want to get this done, time to get dressed, boss.”

She nodded and followed him into her bedroom.

The daily shot came first, of course, even before she changed clothes. She waited out the grim side effects, trying to decide if it was better this time or worse; she couldn’t tell. It just felt awful, again. Then…gone.
Another twenty-four hours of borrowed time,
she thought.
I’m a life addict.